1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to systems and methods for determining future locations of users, and more particularly, monetizing such future locations with advertisements targeted to users based on their future locations.
2. Related Art
Internet advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry and is growing at double digit rates in recent years. It is also the major revenue source for internet companies such as Yahoo!® that provide advertising networks that connect advertisers, publishers, and Internet users. As an intermediary, these companies are also referred to as advertiser brokers or providers. New and creative ways to attract attention of users to advertisements (“ads”) or to the sponsors of those advertisements help to grow the effectiveness of online advertising, and thus increases the growth of sponsored and organic advertising. Publishers partner with advertisers, or allow advertisements to be delivered to their web pages, to help pay for the published content, or for other marketing reasons.
Social networking has also blossomed and provides a unique, relatively new source of advertising. Social networking sites can obtain information about its users that is more plentiful and easier to track and put to use compared to times before social media. This information can be leveraged to better target advertising to social media users that they are more likely to be interested in, making the advertising experience more enjoyable for the users and more profitable for the advertisers.
Furthermore, the popularity of location-based applications and advertising has grown over recent years such that advertisements and/or search results are delivered to users at least in part dependent on their locations. It may be difficult, however, to know with much certainty where a user plans to be located in the future such as to target advertising based on something other than current location.